6 ms·

With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on almost any hardware or underlying t

by jdiff 1y ago

With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on almost any hardware or underlying tech stack you can scrounge together? The only thing they'd be really against is designing new hardware to run Uxn "natively," which would seem to push you exclusively to reuse what you have.

kragen 1y ago
100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO. It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
- roughly 1y ago
  > the first attempt <…> good enough to criticize. Ooh, I like this phrase.
  - kragen 1y ago
    From Wiki: http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-criticize http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-criticize > Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious step toward Kay's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost in mobile devices since. https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab... While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison of me to Alan Kay is not.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Paywall, so, from https://web.archive.org/web/20170930235704/https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://web.archive.org/web/20170930235704/https://www.fastc...: > Jobs always admired Kay, who in 1984 famously told Newsweek that the Mac was the “first personal computer worth criticizing.” Just before Jobs was fired from his first stint at Apple in the ’80s, he’d been pushing an effort to get the Dynabook built in Cupertino. The two would talk on the phone every couple of months until Steve’s passing, and Jobs invited him to the unveiling of the iPhone in January, 2007.
- jdiff 1y ago
  The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy. Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
  - kragen 1y ago
    You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM. As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM. (Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.) What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the wreckage of the drone that killed your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips. In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it. In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers. That seems likely to remain true even after the PRC invades Taiwan in a few years.
    - 1y ago
- d66 1y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. I have an eZ80-based emulator for the AgonLight2 that is already running well enough to run some real (console-based) ROMs: https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/ https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/ (I'm new to eZ80 assembly so the project is going slower than it otherwise might.) The AgonLight2 has 512K of RAM and a 20 MHz CPU which is more than enough for Varvara. I agree that 8-bit computers of the era (e.g. Pet, Apple 2, C64, TI/99a, etc.) don't have enough RAM to give Varvara its own 64k of memory (though it wouldn't be hard to design a Varvara variant with a smaller memory space) but otherwise there really aren't major barriers. As far as permacomputing goes though, there are plenty of hosts out there with enough memory to comfortably run Varvara (anything 32-bit will be fine, most 16-bit computers would also be fine). Based on my eZ80-based implementation I think any of the eZ80-based TI calculators with 128k or more of user-accessible memory could implement Varvara without major problems.
  - kragen 1y ago
    That'll be fantastic! I'd be delighted to see that! That would make those TI calculators the new smallest machines with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation, and much lower power than the GBA that is the current champion there; I'd really like to get some experience with what that's like, because I've found the experience of using Uxn to be inspiring so far. I also hadn't seen the AgonLight2 before. One quibble, though: the vast majority of 32-bit computers are microcontrollers, and most of them have less than 64KiB of RAM. (My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 goes into more detail about the popular STM32 family.) They would be perfectly adequate for a self-sufficient personal computing experience (most of them have more total memory than the computers I used to run Turbo Pascal on, just less RAM, plus their CPUs are 1000 times faster, and they can read and write SD cards) but probably not with Varvara.
    - d66 1y ago
      That's a fair point. A few of us have been discussing a modified Varvara spec that limits the system to a smaller amount of memory (e.g. 32k, 16k, or 8k). I think with a spec like that it would unlock many implementations that are not currently practical.

by jdiff 1y ago

kragen 1y ago

100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO. It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.

roughly 1y ago
> the first attempt <…> good enough to criticize. Ooh, I like this phrase.
- kragen 1y ago
  From Wiki: http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-criticize http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-criticize > Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious step toward Kay's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost in mobile devices since. https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab... While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison of me to Alan Kay is not.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Paywall, so, from https://web.archive.org/web/20170930235704/https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://web.archive.org/web/20170930235704/https://www.fastc...: > Jobs always admired Kay, who in 1984 famously told Newsweek that the Mac was the “first personal computer worth criticizing.” Just before Jobs was fired from his first stint at Apple in the ’80s, he’d been pushing an effort to get the Dynabook built in Cupertino. The two would talk on the phone every couple of months until Steve’s passing, and Jobs invited him to the unveiling of the iPhone in January, 2007.
jdiff 1y ago
The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy. Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
- kragen 1y ago
  You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM. As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM. (Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.) What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the wreckage of the drone that killed your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips. In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it. In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers. That seems likely to remain true even after the PRC invades Taiwan in a few years.
  - 1y ago
d66 1y ago
I'm not sure that's true. I have an eZ80-based emulator for the AgonLight2 that is already running well enough to run some real (console-based) ROMs: https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/ https://git.phial.org/d6/uxn-ez80/ (I'm new to eZ80 assembly so the project is going slower than it otherwise might.) The AgonLight2 has 512K of RAM and a 20 MHz CPU which is more than enough for Varvara. I agree that 8-bit computers of the era (e.g. Pet, Apple 2, C64, TI/99a, etc.) don't have enough RAM to give Varvara its own 64k of memory (though it wouldn't be hard to design a Varvara variant with a smaller memory space) but otherwise there really aren't major barriers. As far as permacomputing goes though, there are plenty of hosts out there with enough memory to comfortably run Varvara (anything 32-bit will be fine, most 16-bit computers would also be fine). Based on my eZ80-based implementation I think any of the eZ80-based TI calculators with 128k or more of user-accessible memory could implement Varvara without major problems.
- kragen 1y ago
  That'll be fantastic! I'd be delighted to see that! That would make those TI calculators the new smallest machines with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation, and much lower power than the GBA that is the current champion there; I'd really like to get some experience with what that's like, because I've found the experience of using Uxn to be inspiring so far. I also hadn't seen the AgonLight2 before. One quibble, though: the vast majority of 32-bit computers are microcontrollers, and most of them have less than 64KiB of RAM. (My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44611710 goes into more detail about the popular STM32 family.) They would be perfectly adequate for a self-sufficient personal computing experience (most of them have more total memory than the computers I used to run Turbo Pascal on, just less RAM, plus their CPUs are 1000 times faster, and they can read and write SD cards) but probably not with Varvara.
  - d66 1y ago
    That's a fair point. A few of us have been discussing a modified Varvara spec that limits the system to a smaller amount of memory (e.g. 32k, 16k, or 8k). I think with a spec like that it would unlock many implementations that are not currently practical.